Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on travelling,

whether you're just dreaming of a great escape, looking forward to one or actually away and having the time of your life.

Today, I am going to talk about the great blessing that is overbooking. Yes, the idea that airlines will

sell more seats than there are available on the plane. A lot of people are going to be thinking,

what? How can that possibly give me a good idea? Well, just give me a chance

and I will try to convince you that when handled properly, overbooking is a real virtue and it does

great things for the passenger, for the airline, and indeed even for the environment.

Here's how. On average, says EasyJet, 5% of people fail to turn up for its planes. That means that

about nine people on the average full flight simply don't show up.

There's all kinds of reasons, mainly to do with the fact that very often there is no benefit

or indeed even any opportunity to cancel. I was unable to use an easy jet flight just the other week. No way could I

possibly find any sensible way to say to the airline, look, I'm not going to be traveling. It'd be

really nice if you just gave me back. I know that I'm not going to get my fare back, but if you

just give me a little token, then at least you'll be able to sell that seat again. Anyway, so nine people not showing up.

That means the airline has a choice. It could say, we're only going to sell 186 seats, or however many there are on this plane.

Or it could take the chance and say,

actually, let's sell 195.

And the chances are that we will find that actually we've got enough seats

for everybody who wants to travel on that day.

What have we gained from that?

Well, we've gained effectively 195 payments

for the same flight, including Calder's, which we're going to hang on to. And I knew what

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